Summary

ISWC 2012 took place in Boston this year, with many from this group participating in, what I hear was a very productive conference. Many topics were discussed including refining the definition of Identity on the Web, and the split between identity, authentication and authorization.

One of the products of this, and some following teleconferences is the first draft of the spec entitled Web Identity and Discovery. This is a much shorter and focused spec than previous efforts decoupling identity on the web from authentication methods.

In light of the fact that this group has doubled in size in the last year, I’m delighted to announce that we have a second co-chair, Andrei Sambra, who has very kindly volunteered to help with the maintenance and continued development of the Community Group.

There are some impressive demos already for viewing here. Rob has posted a few threads about outreach in his group and is keen to see where the intersection of geo based augmented reality and the read write web can intersect. I’ve already heard interest from one person in the group that is thinking of building a privacy-aware application to allow check-ins to various locations, and allow you to share that with your friends.

Community Group

The Community Group is happy to announce that we will now have two co-chairs, to help manage the administrative tasks of the group and help out in general. As we have doubled in size in the last year, this will hopefully help us to achieve more as a group, and allows for future growth. Andrei is responsible for the my-profile.eu project, and is currently working with Tim Berners-Lee’s group at MIT.

This month was our most active to date, in terms of discussion. There have been a number of threads and also teleconferences to discuss, among other things, hot topics such as Web Identity, Discovery and Access Control.

Applications

There was some discussion on how to add applications to existing identity providers. There’s been some suggestions, however it may be a good if it were possible to add an application to a page or profile using a single “rel” link. I’m hoping we can get at least one implementation in the next month.

One interesting app I came across is a mockup screen designer. It writes your data to localStorage currently, but it might be quite neat to use this with write standards to save your designs to the cloud.

Last but not least…

Google have announced static site hosting via Google Drive. This can potentially allow read and write operations to the web and publishing aspects to a large user base, with an easy, intuitive and non disruptive user experience.